How I Used AI and Automation to Build Tools My Team Actually Uses - Timm Wilson

Presentation:

"How I Used AI and Automation to Build Tools My Team Actually Uses"

We'll learn how AI-powered tools built for sales and marketing teams can reduce churn, streamline content analysis, and turn manual work into automated workflows. We'll also hear how SEO curiosity led to a knack for tool building, which evolved into teaching a team AI best practices and prompting and how repeated requests became the blueprint for self-serve solutions that let people get answers on their own.

Speaker:

Timothy Wilson is the Web Optimization Manager at Pendo, where he focuses on CRO, SEO, and marketing strategy. His technical background in web development allows him to build solutions without relying on engineering resources a skill that's led him to create AI-powered tools for his sales and marketing teams. With over 10 years of SEO experience, including time as an SEO Manager at Go Fish Digital, he brings a builder's mindset to everything he does.

Transcript

1. How I Used AI and Automation to Build Tools My Team Actually Uses From SEO Tinkerer to Marketing Engineer
2. The Manual Era of SEO Manual keyword "peppering" The "Incognito & Refresh" method Siloed Data
3. The Manual Era of SEO Manual keyword "peppering": Endlessly tweaking content without clear data backing.
4. The Manual Era of SEO The "Incognito & Refresh" method: Manually checking rankings and clearing cache, hoping for movement.
5. The Manual Era of SEO Siloed Data: SEO metrics lived in a vacuum that no one else in the organization cared about or understood.
6. Screaming Into the Void
7. Screaming Into the Void The Disconnect "Eyes glaze over" during standard SEO reports. There is a fundamental disconnect between technical clicks/impressions and what the C-Suite actually needs to see.
8. Screaming Into the Void The Solution Stop giving them "spaghetti" and start giving them the "noodle". The common language of the organization is Money and Internal Demo Requests (IDRs).
9. Waterfalls & Water Fountains Stop Reporting, Start Empowering. Instead of being the gatekeeper who stops their day to pull stats for a quarterly deck, I wanted to build "water fountains" that others could drink from. The Goal: Turn manual analysis into automated connectivity.
10. Tool 1: The News & Threat Bot Inputs Aggregating RSS Feeds from sources like Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Land. Process Piping data through n8n/Zapier to an AI Parser to determine validity and summary. Output Delivering custom descriptions to Slack answering: "Why?" and "Should I be worried?"
11. Tool 1: The News & Threat Bot
12. Tool 1: The News & Threat Bot
13. Tool 2: The Claude-Powered Data Analyst •Empowerment: Enabling Marketing Ops & Paid Teams to pull their own stats. •Tech Stack: Using Claude Desktop + MCP (Model Context Protocol). •Connectivity: Direct integration with GA4 and Google Search Console. •Result: Self-serve reports that save time and increase team effectiveness.
14. Tool 2: The Claude-Powered Data Analyst
15. Tool 2: The Claude-Powered Data Analyst The Prompt! Thinking time Data Time
16. Tool 3: The Content Optimizer Focus: Readability and Tone over generic "AI-generated" text. 25 Pages Optimized Human-in-the-loop AI Analysis Connecting GSC API, SEMRush, and Screaming Frog to identify "striking distance" pages. 30 Days Timeframe
17. Tool 3: The Content Optimizer
18. Tool 3: The Content Optimizer
19. Tool 3: The Content Optimizer Fast changes the content team to accept or reject!
20. Emotional Targeting with Personas Using AI for Marketing Fundamentals We built a tool based on emotional targeting and old-school marketing warfare. Custom ChatGPT for persona-based headlines. Identifying "Worries and Wants". Bypassing the "Red Tape" of slow iteration cycles.
21. Emotional Targeting with Personas Talia Wolf book gave me the idea Great book showcasing how people engage / purchase based on the emotions they are feeling.
22. Emotional Targeting with Personas Andy Crestodina had a neat post I saw a good post on building out AI personas to help get a “fake” person and see what they worry about 🧐 https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/ai-marketing-personas/
23. Emotional Targeting with Personas
24. Emotional Targeting with Personas
25. Emotional Targeting with Personas
26. The Rise of the Marketing Engineer Always Be Learning (ABL). SEO curiosity is the blueprint for tool building. Align organic strategy with paid initiatives and build for the team, not just the role. If you aren't using technology to help your team do things better and quicker, you'll fall behind.
27. Questions? Thank you for listening.